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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28735773">Fighting Gravity</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/EvelynThursday/pseuds/EvelynThursday'>EvelynThursday</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who (2005)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Cliffhangers, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I have no plans to continue this, I'd love to read it, Non-Consensual Drug Use, One Shot, Unconsciousness, Whump, feel free to write your own continuation</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 13:00:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,458</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28735773</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/EvelynThursday/pseuds/EvelynThursday</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor is helpless in the Master's trap and the Fam can't help either.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Fighting Gravity</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I wrote this months and months ago, I think I started this just after the first lockdown in my country (around April I think) and it sat finished on my computer since the summer. It's taken this long to give it a title and get round to posting it!</p><p>Pure self indulgent whump. Warning: open ending, though anyone is free to write a continuation.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Doctor stood still within the confines of the Master’s paralysis field, head bowed, eyes closed, held upright only by the force field around her. </p><p>“You really are predictable, Doctor,” he said to her as he paced around the field. She didn’t make any move to reply, unconscious and drugged as a result of the Master’s trap. “You need to make better friends, they are way too trusting of you. And you always have to rescue them.”</p><p>He cast a look at her three human friends currently held, crouched and kneeling in its cramped confines, within a plasma cage on the other side of the room. Simple tech, crude but effective. The more complex tech was reserved solely for the Doctor - nothing was going to break and go wrong here.</p><p>“Just a simple message and they come flocking to your aid. Not that you sent that message” he gloated, both to the Doctor and the friends who were glaring at him from behind green, electrified bars. “And when you realised they were in trouble, here you were! So don’t blame me that it was so easy to get the lot of you under my control.” He turned away from his prisoners and stalked towards the holographic display that lit up one rusted metal wall, it’s control panel below the one thing in the room that didn’t look like it had been abandoned for several years. Even the plasma cage had rust snaking its way around the base of each green, glowing bar.</p><p>The room was quiet as the Master typed on the console, other than the whispering of the humans in the cage and the constant hum of the paralysis field.</p><p>There was a beep and a light started flashing on the console. With a finger flourish he pressed the button to receive the incoming transmission. A face popped up on the holographic display, grey and iridescent, a pair of antennae framing the triangular head.</p><p>“Janus! Very punctual!”</p><p>“You found us humans?” A gruff voice replied. “You agreed to find us humans. We need those test subjects.” </p><p>“Don’t be so hasty, Janus,” he replied, wagging a finger at the screen. “I have some humans, fit and healthy, perfect specimens.” He paused. “You lot are healthy, aren’t you?” he called to the humans. He ignored their shouts of “We’re not test subjects!”, “Let us go, you monster!” and “Doctor!”. “Three,” he said to Janus. “Just like I promised.”</p><p>“Where are you? Give me your location. I want to inspect the subjects.”</p><p>The Master tutted, shaking his head.</p><p>“That’s not what we agreed. Payment first, then I’ll transmit my location.” He grinned at the screen, all teeth and menace. “Cross me and your little science experiment will suddenly find itself thirty years behind schedule.”</p><p>Janus looked shocked.</p><p>“You can’t!”</p><p>The Master’s grin only got bigger.</p><p>“Try me.”</p><p>“You will have your payment in four hours. Make sure those humans stay alive.”</p><p>“Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that, I’ve got something else to occupy my attention.” His face transformed into a sly smile as he glanced at the Doctor’s inert form out of the corner of his eye.</p><p>“Janus, out.” The screen flickered out.</p><p>“Now, Doctor,” he spun on the spot, hands clasped in front of his chest and he seemed to almost skip across to the Doctor’s prison. His steps slowed as he didn’t get the expected acerbic reply. He paced a circuit around her, concentrating on her mental presence. It was faint, ethereal, so unlike her usual solid mental barriers. He stopped in front of her, frowning as he looked at her closely. </p><p>She should have woken up by now, but she was still unconscious, limp and pale under the harsh white light of the paralysis field. Seeing her looking so vulnerable should have been satisfying, a part of the Master’s mind thought, but instead all he felt were indescribable feelings of the unpleasant kind. He tried to muster a feeling of joy as his gaze roamed across dark eyelashes and bloodless lips, but failed.</p><p>Hang on, was she even breathing?</p><p>“Damn you, Doctor,” he snarled to himself. “Why do you always have to put a spanner in the works? Typical!”</p><p>He stomped back to the control panel, wrenching one dial round and forcefully flicking a pair of switches. He paused, one finger on the last button.</p><p>She could be faking. This could be a trick to free herself and save her pathetic friends from being used as lab rats. But when had the Doctor been anything other than pathetically truthful? Deception just wasn’t their style.</p><p>He pressed the button to release the field. The Doctor dropped like a sack of bricks. </p><p>The humans started shouting at him from the other end of the room but he just tuned their annoying voices out.</p><p>He reset the paralysis field’s controls, ready to be reactivated at a moment's notice, just in case, then crossed back to the Doctor’s still form. He paused as he stood at her hip, towering over her as she laid on the floor. </p><p>She was sprawled in a boneless heap on her side, limbs spread out. Her eyes were shut, dark lashes stark against pale cheeks. He was tempted to give her a nudge with his foot, but if the fall hadn’t woken her up… </p><p>He knelt at her side and pressed two fingers to the pulse at her wrist, frowning at the fluttering beats he felt.</p><p>“What’s wrong with her?” shouted the female from the cage. Yaz, he thought her name was, but ignored her all the same. His other hand reached for the pulse at her neck, but the beats were just as weak and irregular there as at her wrist.</p><p>Counting the beats at her neck he moved his first hand in front of the Doctor’s lips. Breath barely ghosted across his knuckles. </p><p>He sighed.</p><p>“Such dramatics, Doctor. You’ve never coped well with drugs and medication, looks like this body is no different.”</p><p>He rummaged in his pocket for the nanoneedle syringe and vial of drugs he knew he had put in there earlier, just for this occasion. He really was the only one to know her as well as he did.</p><p>He inserted the vial in the syringe and primed it.</p><p>“Oi! You leave her alone,” the younger of the two males shouted at him as he pressed the device to her neck.</p><p>“I’m helping her, you idiot!” he spat back over his shoulder.</p><p>He pressed his fingers to the slowing beats in her wrist then pressed the button. He felt it shudder as the drugs were discharged. It took a few seconds for the drugs to circulate her system, but then she gasped as she started breathing heavily, her ribs heaving with each breath. It was if she had been starved of oxygen, which given how weakly she had been breathing, the Master thought, she probably had been. But she'd be fine. Her hearts were racing now, each beat clear and strong. That jolt to the system should reverse any negative effects of the sedative.</p><p>He patted her limp hand, pleased she wasn’t going to regenerate any time soon. Not unless he was the one to stop her hearts when he wanted.</p><p>“I’m not letting you die until I say so. You’ve got to witness the deaths of your pathetic human friends first.”</p><p>He grinned to himself: she was going to feel awful when she woke up. Not even the most physically robust Time Lord would be unaffected by the effects of both the sedative and the stimulant, and the Doctor was famously not one of them. No need to put the force shield back up, she wasn’t going to have the strength to rise for a while.</p><p>He left her and made to cross back to the console, intending to check that the plan was still going as ordered despite his lack of attention. But he paused halfway to his destination. The shouts of the humans were starting to get on his nerves, they had been incessant since the Doctor had collapsed.</p><p>“Will you lot just SHUT UP” he shouted at them, “before I MAKE YOU!”</p><p>Mercifully they quieted down, staring at him from between the bars of their cage with wide, frightened eyes.</p><p>Minutes passed again, the humans whispering amongst themselves. The Master grinned as a message popped up on the holographic display, another pitiful being successfully manipulated to do his bidding. He typed a message back, triumphantly humming a little tune to himself.</p><p>He turned back to the Doctor when he was done. She was still lying where she had fallen but her breathing had settled and eyes had cracked open, blearily scanning across the room.</p><p>“Ah, Doctor,” he exclaimed. “Welcome back to the party!” He went over and crouched at her side. “You, my dear, have a bad habit of refusing to do what I tell you. So I had no option but to drug you.” She moved a sluggish arm and tried to rise. “Ah, ah, I wouldn’t try that quite yet. You had a bad reaction to the drugs so you’ll be feeling rather rough right now. Wait for that to pass before you try to stand. Don’t worry, I won’t harm your precious humans before you can look them in the eyes as they die.”</p>
<hr/><p>The Doctor didn’t know what she was going to see when she finally opened her eyes. Her first thought was of hypervodka, but the effects of overindulgence usually didn’t include the scent of dust and death. Or a horribly familiar presence hovering nearby.</p><p>She lay there, still, listening to the movements of the Master as she tried and failed to quell the nausea and to gain the motivation to move. It felt like the gravity was pressing her to the floor and even just the thought of moving seemed painful. <em>Thinking</em> was an effort. Just what exactly had happened to make her feel this terrible?</p><p>It seemed to take a while but her eyes finally opened to reveal the shape of the Master, silhouetted by a holographic display, back turned. She tried to read what was on the display, but her eyes refused to focus on the writing.</p><p>She realised he was humming and her heart sank. His thoughts tended to have a musical slant when he was exceptionally happy with himself. Even now, hundreds of years since she was trapped in the Year-That-Never-Was there were some songs that she couldn’t stomach to hear more than a few notes of.</p><p>He turned towards her, his humming stopping when he noticed she was awake. She tried to move as he crouched over her, gloating clear in his voice, but could do little but make feeble movements. She just felt so weak, disturbingly so, and resisted the temptation to just lie there and pass back out again. Her friends needed her. A small part of her brain that wasn’t sluggishly blank wondered exactly what drugs he had given her. </p><p>She blinked slowly up at him as the words he had spoken filtered through her mind. The anger that coursed through her when she understood his words swept away some of the grogginess that covered her senses and she managed to leaver herself forward up onto shaking elbows.</p><p>“Don’t you hurt my friends,” she growled at him.</p><p>“What are you gonna do,” he laughed back, “lying there like that?” She tried to get her hands under her but only managed to rise a few inches before falling heavily back onto her elbows. Exhausted by this tiny movement her head sunk, forehead cooled by the metal floor.</p><p>“What you gonna do to them?” She asked when she gained the strength to lift her head again.</p><p>“Me? I’m not going to do anything. It’s the Noptera that’s going to kill them with their ‘scientific research’. I just need to transmit our location and then poof,” he made a little explosion motion with his hands, “science lab. No messy blood to clean up. Just a nice and clean but painful death, no effort required to enjoy the action. And I don’t even have to go to the trouble of disposing of the bodies!” The Doctor lip curled at the Master’s expression of glee.</p><p>“And what's in it for you? Other than getting your kicks from suffering and death.”</p><p>“Your undivided attention. No hangers on to get in the way. And the horrible death of your friends is just an added bonus, I could have just imprisoned them on an uninhabited planet.” The Master’s gleeful grin suddenly turned into a snarl. “I want you to know how I feel. To have everything taken away from you. To look to your side and find <em>no one</em>.” His expression jolted back to a thoughtful one. “And what Janus is paying me is not to be sniffed at. I think even you would be impressed with the amount of credits I’ve sold your friends for.”</p><p>The Doctor did not look impressed.</p><p>“Where are my friends?” she growled out from behind her teeth.</p><p>The Master smirked, rising and turning back to his controls.</p><p>“Behind you.”</p><p>The Doctor managed to wrestle enough control of her body to sit up, twisting until she got a view of the plasma cage surrounding her friends.</p><p>“Fam,” she murmured, relieved they looked unharmed, though scared, but worried that she didn’t have the strength to get them out of their confinement. Or stop the Master from completing his plan. </p><p>No, stop talking like that, she thought. She had to try. She couldn’t fail them like so many of her previous friends. Like Bill. And Clara. And- no, stop. Focus on now.</p><p>“I’ll get you out of there,” she called to her friends. </p><p>The Doctor gritted her teeth, forcing unwieldy limbs to cooperate. She managed to rise to her knees, hands braced on the floor as gravity seemed to pull at her stronger. She resisted the urge to fall back down, pushing against the floor with all her might, almost groaning with the effort. </p><p>It was almost a surprise to find herself on her feet, though the world seemed to tilt and twist around her. She staggered to one side but managed to tilt herself so that she started to stumble forward, towards her friends. She didn’t know how she was going to get them out of the cage, but she was sure she’d figure that out when she got there.</p><p>If she got there.</p>
<hr/><p>The Master only watched, amused at the Doctor’s stubborn determination, as she managed to rise to her feet. He made no movement to help her up, just lounged against the control panel behind him, expecting her to fall long before she made it to full height.</p><p>She didn’t fall.</p><p>The Doctor was shaky legged and uncertain on her feet, but she was standing. It was like looking at a newborn foal taking their first steps.</p><p>The Master started walking towards her, going to stop her before she reached the plasma cage and tried to free her friends. She had made it this far, she couldn’t be allowed to make it any further.</p><p>He circled around her, giving her a wide berth to watch her efforts. He would enjoy the Doctor’s efforts before he had to stop her and let her waste her energy before she had regained the strength to walk effortlessly again.</p><p>He smirked when he rounded her enough to see her face. Sweat had beaded at her forehead and her teeth were bared in an expression of intense concentration. Her eyes started to droop after a few staggered steps.</p><p>He could see the exact moment when her lights went out. Her eyes suddenly rolled and her knees suddenly buckled.</p><p>“Doctor!” Her friends called, still helpless in their cage.</p><p>He ran the few steps between them as she fell, hands against her chest and shoulder as their knees hit the floor and the rest of her body sagged to join them.</p><p>“Tut tut, Doctor,” he admonished as her unfocused eyes roved wildly. “I told you to stay still.” He tilted her to one side and let her fall, climbing up back to his feet. </p><p>“Doctor!” The female cried. He was sure that if the bars of the cage weren’t electrified she would be pressed against them, arm outstretched towards her friend.</p><p>The Master ignored the humans’ noises of protest as he moved to the side of their cage and deadlock sealed it to his biometric print. He really should have done that earlier, but now not even the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver could get the humans out, when she realised it was not in her pocket and was instead sitting atop the controls of the paralysis field at the other end of the room.</p><p>The Doctor was quietly groaning as he crossed back to his display, intending to check if Janus had paid him yet. Eyes screwed shut, she was fighting the urge to be sick. Somehow everything hurt more than when she woke up the first time and even the smell of the dust that had blown in from outside was causing acid to rise in the back of her throat.</p><p>She couldn’t do anything other than listen to her friends’ concerned murmuring until the nausea passed. But finally it did, though it still felt like the gravity had increased since the TARDIS had first landed on this planet.</p><p>She blinked tired eyes open and fought herself up onto her elbows. She was greeted by the smiling faces of her friends behind the green glow of the electronic bars. </p><p>“Fam?” she asked, vision still a little blurry.</p><p>“We’re here, Doctor,” said Yaz. “We’re alright.”</p><p>“For the moment,” added Graham. “I don’t want to push you but this cramped cage is wreaking havoc on my knees.”</p><p>“I’ll get you out of there,” she said, fighting gravity with shaking arms to sit upright, head hanging as the world suddenly shifted on its axis. “Just give me a moment.”</p><p>“Take it slow,” said Ryan. “Don’t want you passing out on us again.”</p><p>“Can’t be too slow, I gotta get you out of here.”</p><p>She looked back at the Master, who had his back to them as he read off his screen, ignoring them completely. She turned back to her friends, clenching her teeth together.</p><p>She struggled her way back to her feet, hating the way the world still bucked and rolled under her feet, and to be honest a little worried. Just what had the Master drugged her with? Surely it should be wearing off by now.</p><p>The cage holding her friends was only a few steps away and she could see the controls to switch off the electrical bars and set them free. It looked like a simple mechanism, easy to break. </p><p>Those few steps were a struggle, muscles protesting and head spinning, consciousness flickering dangerously again. But she made it this time, relieved to feel the cool and rough metal under her hands.</p><p>She leant against the top of the cage, resting a moment before she tackled the controls. The Master still had his back to them, his attention completely captivated by whatever was on his screen. He was humming again.</p><p>She reached into her inside pocket and found only empty space. She frantically patted down her coat but still couldn’t find what she was looking for. She stared at her friends with large, apologetic eyes.</p><p>“I don’t have my sonic.”</p><p>“Would you really think I would let you have this?” The Master waved her sonic screwdriver in the air over his shoulder, still facing his screen. “I think it’s safer for all of us that this stays here.” He put it back on top of the paralysis field controls, in full view but out of reach of everyone but him. “Wait, no. It’s safer for me. You lot have no choice but to go somewhere decidedly <em>not</em> safe.” He cruelly grinned at them over his shoulder before frowning and turning towards them. "Doctor, sit back down before you fall down again." He sighed at the defiance in her eyes as she stayed standing. "Fine then. You are only hastening their end." He tapped a few buttons on his console. “Our location has been sent. You don’t have long before Janus gets here and transports us to his labs. I’ll be nice and let you choose which one of your pets gets to be the first to be used as a lab rat.” A message beeped as it popped up on the display. </p><p>“Now, Doctor,” the Master smirked after reading the message. “Janus is on his way, you’ve got 5 minutes. Which one would you like to see suffer first?”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>If anyone want to continue this they can, just used the 'inspired by' button or send me a link <a href="https://evieswritingjournal.tumblr.com/">via my Tumblr</a>. You don't even have to write a fic, just message me what you think will happen because I don't know what happens next!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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